Scary Tea Partiers

Today, April 15, is the last day Americans have to file their income taxes, and a bunch of conservative activist groups, tired with all the money going to federal bailouts and economic stimulus programs, today held one of the most asinine anti-tax protests in recent memory . . . and that's saying something. People all over America gathered in cities and towns holding "tea parties," referring to the infamous Boston Tea Party protest of 1773 against the high British tax on tea. It was on a cold night that December in which colonists raided a merchant ship in Boston Harbor carrying tea, dumped its contents into the water, and in so doing invented iced tea and turned America into a land of coffee drinkers.

Many of the conservative activists holding such protests today sent teabags to Democrats in Washington for raising taxes and spending it on corporate bailout and government programs - the kind meant to stabilize the economy and save jobs - and vowed to make sure these dastardly Democrats voted out of office. Though the protesters claimed to being holding up the ideals of the intrepid colonists who protested the tea tax of 1773, they forgot one thing - those Bostonians of long ago were protesting taxation without representation. We have taxation with representation, and our representatives voted for these programs because we the people voted to send them to Washington and fix the economy.

CNN covered one "tea party" protest in Chicago that bordered on the scary. The reliably unflappable CNN reporter Susan Roesgen waded into the ugly, vicious demonstration and found one protester carrying a picture depicting President Obama as Adolf Hitler and decrying him as a fascist. Roesgen asked him why the President was a fascist, and the protester could do no more than say it was because, well, he was a fascist. Unable to get a more detailed explanation, Roesgen asked another protester to explain why he would be against his taxes going to help stimulate the economy, from which his (and the President's) home state of Illinois would benefit so tremendously - $50 billion, according at one estimate. The protester cited how Illinois's own Abraham Lincoln stood for equality and liberty, and how such taxes would be an affront to him - conveniently forgetting that Lincoln instituted the first federal income tax to pay for the Civil War.

This same protester held his two-year-old son in his arms and got him involved by having him hold a sign about how the increased spending would affect him, as it would raise the debt and make today's toddlers pay it off years from now as adults. I get the point, but how could Republicans who stand for family values condone the cynical use of a child to make a political statement?

One other thing I noticed was the absence of black people in the demonstration. These teabag demonstrations were supposed to be grass-roots protests representing all the people, so how come this Chicago protest had no brothers in it? Are you telling me they couldn't find one black person, or Latino or Asian-American for that matter, in Chicago to demonstrate against high taxes, if only for the sake of appearances? As for women, there was only one woman I noticed at this protest . . . Susan Roesgen.

I admire Roesgen greatly for putting herself into this mean-spirited protest and escaping with her dignity unharmed. She's my new heroine now.

While CNN and MSNBC gave the "tea parties" adequate coverage, Fox News covered it around the clock, in just about every part of America. Fox defended their reporting of the events, insisting that when Louis Farrakhan held the Million Man March in Washington, they gave similar coverage to that protest even though it was spearheaded by the left.

Nice rhetoric, but it's not true. It couldn't be. Leaving aside from the fact that no one who knows anything about the Nation of Islam's beliefs - the sect decries welfare as a paternalistic form of dependency - would call Farrakhan a leftist, the Million Man March was held about a year before Fox News even went on the air.

Who is Fox News kidding with their biased coverage and their naked agenda? Apparently, a lot of us: Recent reports have indicated that Fox News, after a ratings slump during 2008, is once again America's most watched cable news channel by a wide margin, thanks largely to the successful bluster of noted schizophrenic, egocentric, paranoiac prima donna Glenn Beck.

As for the original Boston Tea Party, I remember how George Banks recalled the colonists' behavior in Mary Poppins. "They were very rude," he said, "even for Americans."

Some things never change. :-p